Surfacing briefly from the job market slog with a couple of fun announcements!
The first (and smallest) is that I’ve been asked to be an inaugural Tufts AI Faculty Fellow (a status about which I will undoubtedly have comment) with my “Tufts Lecturer” hat on. Very excited to get to work on my project, which can be summarised as “how are liberal arts colleges trying to integrate questions about AI and society into course design?”
The second (and most important, to me) is that I’m now officially a historian, with the acceptance of my new paper on the history of the University of Washington Gender Identity Clinic by the Bulletin of the History of Medicine. The paper, and the story behind it, are a doozy, as the abstract suggests:
This paper explores the history of the University of Washington Gender Identity Clinic – a clinical research unit operating from 1968 until 1972 undertaking both scientific work, and patient care, relating to transgender medicine. Exploring the history of the clinic – its origins, process, and untimely end thanks to financial fraud by the surgeon – I expand on our understanding of the histories of transgender medicine in the 1960s-1970s, documenting the practices of a clinic off the beaten path of many histories of transgender care. The results demonstrate the practical and bioethical complexity of hybridizing clinical research and care, particularly under charged cultural circumstances, and the value of inquiring further into this era and structural form of trans care. This carries lessons for both historians seeking to study clinical research generally (and clinical research around trans medicine in particular), and efforts to legitimize transgender medicine in this current moment.
The preprint is here; actual publication is scheduled for Fall 2027 (since BHM is a very Traditional Journal) but I’ll throw the typeset preprint up when I have it.